If the multiple outer joins or subqueries are too slow you can always denormalise a bit, you don't have to give up on your SQL database if you don't want to.

I still think it is amazing the the free SQL databases don't have materialized views yet.

MySQL's deficiencies aren't inherent to SQL databases. Other databases have faster query parsers and better query planners. It seems that with all the time and money invested into NoSQL solutions, Postgres could be improved to the level of Oracle or DB2.

This comment, which I completely agree with, really depresses me. People really like competing with each other rather than working together to build awesome solutions (and users often even /encourage/ this behavior with a pro-competition bias). The idea that we now have a million "sort of crummy" storage solutions rather than a couple, or even one, really good one--and mostly due to superficial differences in syntax of usage or specification of deployment--makes me want to cry.

I suddenly hope that by 2015 PostgreSQL ends up as the winner of the database wars, having embraced and outgrown every feature from every other data store out there.